Note on the Reporting of Growth

TO THE STEWARDSHIP REP/1996/11

ON THE REPORTING OF GROWTH

1. The return for 1995 reports first attendances up by a fifth and reports nothing else about them. I object to the form of that sentence and I want to say why at some length, because I intend to keep objecting.

2. A number reported alone is a claim. First attendances up a fifth means, on its face, that we are doing well. It also means that eleven conveners received twenty per cent more people with no increase in conveners, and two of them wrote to say they could not do it, and those letters are not in the return.

3. There is no such thing as growth in this Institute. There is only more work, arriving. Every person who comes is a set of duties somebody will hold: a meal cooked, a name learned, a letter answered, a place kept. If we report the arrival and not the duty we are describing ourselves the way a business describes itself, and we will begin, within about a decade, to want the number to rise for its own sake.

4. I propose the rule: no figure reported as an increase without the burden it creates reported in the same paragraph. Not an appendix. The same paragraph, so that nobody can quote one without the other.

5. I propose further that we cease measuring the proportion of first attenders who return. We have measured it since 1988. Two houses now behave differently toward people they judge unlikely to return, which I can demonstrate, and I would rather lose the figure than keep the behaviour.

6. If the Institute is one day much smaller, that will be a fact about the Institute and not a failure. I would like the reporting to be capable of saying so.

— the archivist